robert.admin – Page 18 – Robert Raymond’s Blogtorium

January 13, 2025

OpsLog – P&VW – 1/9/2025

hat a difference forty-five minutes of traffic, a bunch of socializing and a big spaghetti dinner makes. We’d finished the Virginia Southwestern in the late afternoon. It had been a long day. And we made it even longer with a second operations go-round, this time on Tom Wilson’s wonderful Pittsburgh & West Virginia. We all told train stories and then while Tom went over train things in the layout room, I retired to some little granddaughter’s cute pink bedroom (some dispatcher’s office that was. There wasn’t even a spittoon) to do my thing. I could hear Tom’s wife chatting with […]

January 13, 2025

OpsLog – VSW – 1/9/2025

usy weekend for me. The Protorails convention is going on but I cannot attend since I’ll be managing a two day display setup of our sectional layout in Deland. But as part of the convention, they sold spots on both the Virginia Southwestern and the Pittburgh & West Virginia. I ended up to getting invited to a double dose of dispatching, running the railroads from back rooms, sight unseen – ignore the man behind the curtain. And first up; John Wilkes’ VSW. I gotta say that I love this railroad (or rather, two railroads, the L&N (the busy stressful line) […]

January 3, 2025

OpsLog – TC – 1/1/2025

o I’m standing under a post-midnight sky, brilliant with summer stars. Crickets are chirping. Bats flutter past. You might imagine I can smell dew-laden grass but no, my nose is numb from sulfuric diesel fumes, radiating from the fuel distributor Atlantic Coast Line uses to refuel engines out here in the ass end of nowhere. I’m pumping gallon after gallon into my Dash-9. Yes, the prior engineer was trying to look goody-goody to railroad management, running the Tidewater late to up his tonnage. He brought the unit in after midnight, on fumes, like a teenager with his dad’s car. I […]

January 1, 2025

OpsLog – TBL – 12/30/2024

y final blog post for the year, and a model train operations one. We just squeaked this in, last minute. Club president Shannon asked for a quiet little puzzler (he came to a six-person session in September and got smoked). So we slipped over to the club in the waning days of the year for a quiet little to-do. Since Shannon is building a lengthened version of this, he wants to see how the town of Tuscarora does business. When his layout is up, it’s going to put mine to shame. Anyway, running more like Greg and I did in […]

January 1, 2025

Game Design (DOG EAR)

‘ve started doing game design again. This is always one of my secondary hobbies – I made enough money to change my life with Eagles back in 1983. And then I designed Cybertank and Cybership for Games Computers Play. A lot of you have played my Pits of Seth games which I wrote over my entire life. And of course there was the massive Solar Trader which started off as more a dare between Jesse Markowitz and myself. Oh, and then a couple of years ago, I got into GameBooks with StoreyMinus and PathFinder, both on the Squiffy site. And […]

December 29, 2024

The Galaxy and the Ground Within (Review)

hree aliens walk into a bar. Well, rather, a B&B rest stop. The last (so far) of Becky Chambers’ award-winning series about distant and dissimilar characters. For this one, we have Pei (who was referenced in one of the other books or two as the first book’s captain’s lover). So the story here is that there is a jump point in the literal middle of nowhere (and in space, there is a lot of nowhere). Alien ships from every race pass through this location and on a dead planet in the center of this space roundabout, there are domes and […]

December 26, 2024

Best of 2024 (DOG EAR)

nother year passes. I had a very eventual year – earned an award from the Model Railroad association. Was involved with seventy model train operation sessions. Kept up with my writing commitments. Caught Covid (light version) and RSV (not so light, but ducked the associated Pneumonia). Went through two hurricanes. Usual stuff. And I read a lot of books. So the following list is not a New Yorker list or anything like that. It’s the books I’ve read and enjoyed. These are just the top selections from my own readings, managing (roughly) a book a week (or more) – I’ve […]

December 23, 2024

OpsLog – WAZU – 12/22/2024

o last week I had RSV (now everyone who knows me and was around me is giving me the stink eye). Felt pretty bad at the high water mark (lung water, that is). So now I’m in the recovery mode but the doctor who saw me in the ER said if I don’t get better in a day or so, I gotta come back to avoid it turning into Pneumonia. Well, shit. But I think I developed a sure-fire cure. First, go to a doctors clinic (well, Doc Andy is a veterinarian, but a damn good one). Makes sure […]

December 23, 2024

The General Danced at Dawn (Review)

eorge MacDonald Fraser wrote many great books across his long literary life including the Flashman Series. I’ve been reading him since my teens. And I can’t explain it but I had a recent dream were I remembered (in disjointed parts) the story The General Danced at Dawn. Decided to reread it so I carried it with me to the local botanical gardens and bought a coffee and sat down and read it again. So Fraser’s McAuslan series deals with “the dirtiest soldier in the world”. He is based (along with the narrator) in a fictional Scottish unit in the North […]

December 20, 2024

OpsLog – LM&O – 12/18/2024

really wanted to run trains on this eighteenth of December session. At our Just Run Trains session, I’d run the MT ores over the hill. Having heard so many sad epics of problems, I wanted to see if they were as troublesome of trucks as I’d been told. Also, since Leonard and Zeus were splitting the dispatching, I finally could be out on the road. And since I was recovering from a flu, I would wear a mask. There are too many crews who would be looking for the “Dispatcher in the Roundhouse” and administer a beat down if given […]